“Oh, it’s been using him just the same; it couldn’t change its way of using him if it wanted to, for he wouldn’t let it.”

“I can easily believe that, Mrs. Sellers.”

“Yes, you see, he doesn’t change, himself—­not the least little bit in the world—­he’s always Mulberry Sellers.”

“I can see that plain enough.”

“Just the same old scheming, generous, good-hearted, moonshiny, hopeful, no-account failure he always was, and still everybody likes him just as well as if he was the shiningest success.”

“They always did:  and it was natural, because he was so obliging and accommodating, and had something about him that made it kind of easy to ask help of him, or favors—­you didn’t feel shy, you know, or have that wish—­you—­didn’t—­have—­to—­try feeling that you have with other people.”

“It’s just so, yet; and a body wonders at it, too, because he’s been shamefully treated, many times, by people that had used him for a ladder to climb up by, and then kicked him down when they didn’t need him any more.  For a time you can see he’s hurt, his pride’s wounded, because he shrinks away from that thing and don’t want to talk about it—­and so I used to think now he’s learned something and he’ll be more careful hereafter—­but laws! in a couple of weeks he’s forgotten all about it, and any selfish tramp out of nobody knows where can come and put up a poor mouth and walk right into his heart with his boots on.”

“It must try your patience pretty sharply sometimes.”

“Oh, no, I’m used to it; and I’d rather have him so than the other way.  When I call him a failure, I mean to the world he’s a failure; he isn’t to me.  I don’t know as I want him different much different, anyway.  I have to scold him some, snarl at him, you might even call it, but I reckon I’d do that just the same, if he was different—­it’s my make.  But I’m a good deal less snarly and more contented when he’s a failure than I am when he isn’t.”

“Then he isn’t always a failure,” said Hawking, brightening.

“Him?  Oh, bless you, no.  He makes a strike, as he calls it, from time to time.  Then’s my time to fret and fuss.  For the money just flies —­first come first served.  Straight off, he loads up the house with cripples and idiots and stray cats and all the different kinds of poor wrecks that other people don’t want and he does, and then when the poverty comes again I’ve got to clear the most of them out or we’d starve; and that distresses him, and me the same, of course.

“Here’s old Dan’l and old Jinny, that the sheriff sold south one of the times that we got bankrupted before the war—­they came wandering back after the peace, worn out and used up on the cotton plantations, helpless, and not another lick of work left in their old hides for the rest of this earthly pilgrimage—­and we so pinched, oh so pinched for the very crumbs to keep life in us, and he just flung the door wide, and the way he